Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2024

[Olga Tymchenko]

[Witness spoke in Ukrainian, interpreted as follows:]

Thank you for this question.

It's very important to exert pressure on Russia through any means possible, be it diplomatically or otherwise, in order to pressure Russia to return our children.

When these children come back, they need a long process of rehabilitation and care. In Valeriia's case, for example, she has panic attacks as soon as she hears the Russian language. She believes that Russians may be present and, as Veronika said, anything could happen. It's unpredictable.

When she hears thunder or explosions, she has a panic attack. She is very afraid to cross any kind of border. We went to Poland with her, which is a safe border, and she will often have heart palpitations. She starts erasing her phone because the situation leads her to be triggered. She starts being afraid that she will be taken away somewhere.

These children need a long process of rehabilitation. Valeriia has been working with a psychologist for over a year, and only now is she starting to become better. If there are any programs, best practices or exchanges in Canada, and maybe camps for children like this, where they could travel and get some rest, those would be some ideas to mention.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you for all that you are doing as well and for articulating that. I think there are some very important things that perhaps we could follow up on in terms of providing support for some of these young children.

I also have a question for Mykola.

Very quickly, you're talking about young boys—as young as 17—who are being forcibly conscripted to turn around and fight, essentially against their own people. Of course, that would amount to child soldiers. At 17, they are minors.

You talked about international law, but what more can be done to ensure that international law is actually upheld in these instances?

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you.

Mr. Kuleba, before you speak, can you please lower your mic? Put it down a bit.

Thank you. Go ahead.

[Mykola Kuleba]

Thank you so much. It's a very hard question. It's very hard to answer and give any recommendations to the United Nations or big organizations.

The message I stated last year at the United Nations Security Council, and in many parliaments, is simple: I know that, in 10 or 20 years, we will prove that what is happening now with Ukrainian children is genocide.

What can we do now? Why don't we put huge pressure on Russia with sanctions to stop this war, help innocent children come back to Ukrainian territory and reunite these families? Every day, we are repatriating kids from these territories. It is horrible. I cannot imagine if my child were stolen. Nobody can imagine it, but it's happening in Ukraine right now.

We need a strong voice around the globe for Ukrainian children.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. Vandenbeld.

Mr. Brunelle‑Duceppe, you now have the floor for five minutes.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank all the witnesses for joining us for this vital study.

I must start with you, Ms. Sheldagaieva. I think that your remarks have shaken us all. I'm a father. I have a 21‑year‑old son, a 19‑year‑old daughter and a 13‑year‑old daughter. I'll make sure that they hear your story so that they can educate young people here about the reality of children in Ukraine. I think that the impact of your message matters. Your message absolutely must reach the entire international community.

I would like to ask you just one question. What's your biggest dream?

[Veronika Sheldagaieva]

I guess each Ukrainian now has the same dream: to have victory in this war, to have no occupied territories and to have people who went through a hard experience be psychologically healthy and working on rebuilding.

My biggest dream is to look around myself at all the people and understand that, even though we went through everything, we are connected. We're a very talented community within civil society—I'm a person who is very connected to civil society—doing innovations to build a very good country.

Thank you.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Kuleba, this meeting today is partly your doing. You informed all the political parties of the need to hold this type of meeting. I would like to thank you for that. My questions will be a bit more technical.

First, NGOs such as yours, Save Ukraine, have been instrumental in finding Ukrainian children in Russia and bringing them back to Ukraine. This is largely the result of your work.

Can you tell the committee what strategies have proved effective in securing the return of these children?

[Mykola Kuleba]

Thank you.

We have a program, through the support of Canada, with Hala Systems to identify and locate Ukrainian children—stolen children, especially. We are building communications with those kids and finding their relatives and parents. Our repatriations look like underground railroads for these kids, because Russia is banning any way to take these children back to Ukraine. If you are a mother going to Russia to take back your child, you will be deported back to Ukraine and banned from Russia or Belarus for 20 years. That's why every one of our returns is like a special operation. We are working with special services.

After that, what is extremely important.... Veronika told you very powerful things about mental health and recovery. We are building services on the ground in local communities for different categories: orphans, children who experienced sexual abuse, families with babies and pregnant women. They are extremely vulnerable. The families of veterans are also extremely vulnerable. Very often, they have trauma. We need strong support to rebuild our country—to build a new country based on democratic principles, together with you and all of the civilized world.

We are a democratic country. You are a great example for us. Many Ukrainians came to your country to build it a hundred years ago and more. We want to do it together with you. We believe in our victory. We believe we can rebuild our country.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Kuleba, in an interview with Le Monde, you stated that the Russification of Ukrainian children has increased since the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova‑Belova, the children's rights commissioner. Since then, it has become almost impossible to bring children home.

Could you explain how Russia's situation or approach has changed since March 2023?

[Mykola Kuleba]

The situation is very hard. Many kids disappeared from social media. You will not find information about where they are or how many have been placed with Russian families. Just today, some Yale research announced that more than 300 children have been placed with Russian families. Through this research, we have clarity. We found that Russian officials, including President Putin, directly authorized the forced adoption and fostering of Ukrainian children in a program deemed to be a potential war crime or crime against humanity.

It's very hard. Every day, Russian propaganda is poisoning Ukrainian children and erasing their identity. Very often, when we connect with a child, they are very afraid to come back to controlled Ukrainian territory because they believe, through Russian propaganda, that Nazis will kill them. It's very hard to convince an innocent child that no one will hurt them in Ukraine. Because of propaganda, many children believe this. They attend Russian school, even kindergarten. Russia brainwashes children everywhere.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you. Time is running out.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Now I invite Mr. Johns to take the floor for seven minutes.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank our witnesses for their very important, very moving and very powerful testimony.

I'm going to start with you, Veronika.

Can you speak about how the trauma of the war has continued to impact your life and the lives of your friends? Also, follow up on what you think might be necessary in terms of additional supports that could be provided when children are returned home to Ukraine.

[Veronika Sheldagaieva]

Thank you for the question.

I feel that, for me, it became a part of my mental health already. I guess this feeling of uncertainty and of not understanding what would be next makes me differ a lot from my friends abroad, for example, who are pretty sure about their next years. This also includes people who are in free territories of Ukraine but are still experiencing war.

Also, I have close friends who are experiencing horrors at night. They're returning back. They have the same horrors that remain with them. People become more anxious. As I talked with psychologists, your concentration can be decreased because of this fact, because your mental health is trying to work with everything that you know. I still feel that I'm missing, sometimes, part of my memories because I'm simply trying to move on and live my life.

What can be done? I guess it's really important to have centralized psychological health that is available—not only for people who have lots of material resources, who live in big cities and who have money. Also, I am really thankful that I found Voices of Children at some point in time. We started working with them a really long time ago, and this helped.

I also feel that the involvement of youth, children and so on, is really important. When you feel that you are needed and that you are helping others, and when you find people with similar experiences and have that peer support from people who experienced the same, sometimes it's the most important thing to live your life.

I guess the thing that includes all the things that I said is that we need to speak about this experience, because it is only if you are formulating it from your head to text, to talking and to everything, that you then finally understand what happened to you. Even if you have lots of time to think without Internet, without connection and without everything, you cannot reflect there, so you need to go and understand that now it's part of you. We cannot cancel out experiences. We can only try to make something so that other people would not experience the same as us.

Thank you.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

You're incredibly wise, Veronika.

Veronika, can you speak about how important it is to you that other countries continue to stand with Ukraine? How can individuals with platforms continue to raise the awareness of the plight of Ukrainian children?

[Veronika Sheldagaieva]

Thank you.

I guess it's basic, but you really need to do it when you're spreading information through your social media, which is one of the most powerful instruments now. Also, we all know that there is a social media Internet war around the spreading of information, with propaganda and so on. It's important for individuals to spread information that officials are posting.

I also feel it's important not to forget about charities, foundations and so on, because it's a way for lots of people to gather together and, through small gestures, to help each other.

It's really important that other countries at least believe you. Now, I'm in an international community, and I'm communicating with people all around the world a lot. I feel sometimes that you just need to first explain context, and then, your life experience. It's quite normal that, for countries that are on different continents, like Ukraine and Canada, for example, you don't know...but when you're connected morally, through values, it's really important to know about each other. Ukraine is not only a country that is now asking for help; it's a great partner. We have lots of experiences that I feel we can share with those countries that are ready to be with us now.

I personally always check the news, and when I see communication between Ukraine and other countries, other embassies, parliaments and so on, it's a thing that I really like and really appreciate. It makes me warm in my heart because, once again, when you feel you're not alone, it's the main point where you can be strong.

You can rely on yourself, but is it effective? I don't think so.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Veronika.

Thank you, Mr. Johns.

On behalf of the committee, I would like to thank you all, Ms. Tymchenko, Mr. Kuleba and Ms. Sheldagaieva, for your presence and your testimony. It is really appreciated.

I have a special thank you, again, to Veronika.

Veronika, you touched my heart, and I believe you touched the hearts of all the committee members. I wish you the best.

Thank you all. We have to suspend for a couple of minutes for the next round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

I call the meeting back to order.

I want to welcome the second panel of witnesses.

We're joined by Iryna Suslova, representative for the rights of children.

Ms. Suslova, you have the floor for a maximum of five minutes to give your opening remarks. We'll then open the floor to questions.

The floor is yours for five minutes, Ms. Suslova.

[Iryna Suslova, Representative of the Ombudsman of Ukraine on Child's Rights, Office of Ombudsman of Ukraine]

[Witness spoke in Ukrainian, interpreted as follows:]

Thank you very much. Thank you for your ongoing support of Ukraine.

I represent the office of the representative on children's rights of the office of the President of Ukraine, and I would like to talk to you about the children who are currently under occupied territories and who were forcibly transferred there.

From the beginning of the aggression, and according to data from the information bureau, more than 20,000 children were deported or forcefully transferred. However, as you can tell, we don't really have real data because, in some of the other information we have, there were more than 700,000 children transferred.

These children are so-called “evacuated”, but that is not really true because humanitarian corridors should be opened for evacuation. Unfortunately, after February 24, 2022, there hasn't been a single humanitarian corridor opened to let these children pass, and 1.5 million children remain on occupied territories. We are collecting information about war crimes that the Russian Federation perpetrates against our children, including militarizing and changing their education, and propaganda. Children are being taken, under the pretext of rehabilitation, 2,000 kilometres away from their homes. If the parents protest, they're told that their children will simply be taken away without consent.

All establishments that existed in Russia are now filled with Ukrainian children. Who are these children? Some of them lose their parents because of the war. Some of them are there because they were just taken from their parents, without any kind of consent. We don't know. However, as the commissioner's office, we have to collect information about all of the children who were forcibly removed or deported, and about how all of the children, who are today on the occupied territories, are doing and how their rights are violated. We have to inform IRCC and other international organizations. We have to locate these children and understand where exactly they are.

We work with governmental and non-governmental organizations and with investigative journalists outside Ukraine, who help us use open-source information to locate these children. We work on the verification of these children by using databases in Russia that are open—for example, the adoptions website. In Russia, there are over 300 cases in which we see that children who are being put up for adoption, placed into foster care or adopted into Russian families are Ukrainian children. All of this constitutes war crimes and, unfortunately, no one can help us return these children today.

I have a story of Margarita Prokopenko. She has a brother, who is somewhere. We don't know where they are. They were in one of the orphanages in Kherson that we didn't have the time to evacuate. Margarita was taken by the wife of Sergey Mironov, a Russian politician. Her name was changed, and her date and place of birth were changed. We found her sister, who's been placed into a family. We restored the information, and we were prepared to reunite the children, but the Russian Federation keeps denying us access to this child, saying that we are making this up and that no such child exists.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these cases, and I believe you'll hear more about this from the next speaker.

What should we be doing now, once we know where the children are? We have to look for ways to get them back. One way the ombudsman uses is through Qatar. We are using negotiations to get children back, but this doesn't always work.

In April, Qatar received a list of 560 children, but only 54 on this list came back. Is this a lot? I don't think so. Out of 19,500 children, only 1,019 have come back, and each story they tell is very tragic. We have to double our efforts to get these children back. If we move at the pace we are moving at today, it will take 50 or maybe 60 years to get them back.

It's very important for us to have Canada today and in the future stand with Ukraine the way you stand by us to help with reintegration programs. We also ask you to implement more sanctions against the people who are perpetrating these war crimes.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you.

I would like to invite Mr. Nathaniel Raymond to take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director, Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's an honour to appear before you again, and it's an extra special honour to be able to be here with my colleague Iryna Suslova, who is doing such incredible work on behalf of the children of Ukraine.

This morning at 7:00, eastern standard time, the Yale school of public health's humanitarian research lab, as part of the State Department-funded Conflict Observatory, released a new report on the issue of Russia's treatment of children from Ukraine, entitled “Russia’s Systematic Program of Coerced Adoption and Fostering of Ukraine’s Children”.

This report is the result of a 20-month investigation that resulted in the identification of 314 children from Ukraine. Of those 314 children, 148 were listed in Russia's child placement databases, including 42 who have already been placed for adoption or guardianship or have had a citizen of Russia appointed as their guardian. An additional 166 of these 314 children we have identified, using the databases in large part, have been placed with citizens of Russia for fostering.

I want to state the headline of this research very clearly, because what it shows is that our worst fears are realized. Russia is adopting Ukraine's children systematically, in contravention of international law.

If you remember, in March 2023, Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the child rights commissioner of Russia, were indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. What we are discussing here today is a higher order of crime, which, according to Professor Oona Hathaway of the international law department at Yale law school, may constitute crimes against humanity. It's a higher order of crime.

In the initial war crime indictments, the issue was forced deportation. What we are discussing now is the transfer of protected persons from one national or ethnic group to another. That was the basis of the eighth Nuremberg trial, known as the RuSHA trial, against the Nazis for turning Polish children, through a process of Germanification, into German children during World War II.

What we know now is that in addition to the 314 we could identify, there are significantly more Ukrainian children who are basically being posted in these three interconnected databases. One is run by the Ministry of Education. One is funded directly by President Putin's office through the presidential grants fund and an organization called ANO TsRSP.

What we know is that these children are fundamentally being offered to Russian families through an act of deception. They are being presented as if they originated in Russia when, in fact, they originated in Ukraine. You need to know that under Russia's adoption laws, it is a requirement that, for a child to be adopted or fostered, they must be a citizen of Russia. Putin, while violating international law, has sought to comply with Russia's child welfare law. That means, with the Duma and through presidential declaration, working with Maria Lvova-Belova and Anna Kuznetsova of United Russia and the Duma, he has created a pipeline for temporary guardianship and proxy conveyance of citizenship to children from Ukraine.

This is the sum of all fears, because when children are adopted in Russia, the “new parents” and the “new families” can change their names, change their personally identifiable information, and they, for all intents and purposes, disappear.

We know that children have gone to 21 regions in Russia. We think that inside this database, there are children from Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson. The children we identified are from Donets and Luhansk, which were areas under Russia's control prior to the 2022 invasion. We think children from areas taken after February 2022 may also be in the database, but we haven't found them yet.

Tomorrow morning, I will address the United Nations Security Council with U.S. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and we will bring this issue and this evidence directly to Russia and the members of the council. It is there we will have a simple demand: Russia needs to do now what it should have done at the beginning—

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Mr. Raymond, your time is up.